To try and post as regularly as I can, even if it means sitting in Starbucks for five hours writing posts.

Well, I haven’t been to Starbucks, I will admit, but that’s only because there isn’t one near where I live now, and it’s very cold outside. But! I have achieved regular posting even if I haven’t achieved the desired every Sunday for Catan posts and Wednesdays for other stuff.

2. To follow throughonall my plans for the year at least long enough to see if they’re worth making a permanent feature.

I’ve done okay at this one. I’ve achieved two posts for the Games You Can Make At Home series, and one Catan post, so that’s one new thing and the theme both present there! However…. I haven’t managed to research any games. Things have been busy round here and my internet access is rubbish at the moment. But I’m getting proper Wifi on the 6th, so I should be able to pick things up then!

Other update news…. The next game in line with #Discworldathon is Guards! Guards! which will (fingers crossed) be going up in the middle of the month. The re-readathon for that is being hosted by A Novel Haul here on WordPress and also Twitter with the handle @anovelhaul. So feel free to follow up on what she’s up to with the re-readathon.

That’s everything for now, if we’re lucky I’ll get a post up on Sunday, we’ll have to see.

So! It’s the end of January, which is In The Beginning for the Discworldathon! Discussions and the reading of Wyrd Sisters have been going on all month on Bex’s blog anarmchairbythesea and the proclaimed Discworld game for this month is Ankh-Morpork. This game was chosen for this month because the city of Ankh-Morpork features in nearly all of the Discworld novel, and it usually still manages to sneak a mention in those it’s not featured in.

For anyone new to Discworld, here’s a little introduction to the city of Ankh-Morpork in two quotes:

“Ankh-Morpork! Pearl of cities! This is not a completely accurate description, of course — it was not round and shiny — but even its worst enemies would agree that if you had to liken Ankh-Morpork to anything, then it might as well be a piece of rubbish covered with the diseased secretions of a dying mollusc.”
– The Light Fantastic

“Poets have tried to describe Ankh-Morpork. They have failed. Perhaps it’s the sheer zestful vitality of the place, or maybe it’s just that a city with a million inhabitants and no sewers is rather robust for poets, who prefer daffodils and no wonder. So let’s just say that Ankh-Morpork is as full of life as an old cheese on a hot day, as loud as a curse in a cathedral, as bright as an oil slick, as colourful as a bruise and as full of activity, industry, bustle and sheer exuberant busyness as a dead dog on a termite mound.”
– Mort

The game is brilliant in many ways, but mostly because for those who are familiar with the city and it’s inhabitants it is so well constructed. Every card that you play can be identified as a character from one of the books, with the uses of the card being dependent on the personality of that character.

In the books Havelock Vetinari always comes out on top. Even if no one knew that he was in the running. And the game reflects that by stating that the state of the city has been induced by the disappearance of Lord Vetinari. The game itself is those in a position of power in the city attempting to seize control whilst the opportunity is there. Commonly the character of Commander Vimes wins the game, as all he has to do is balance the board, preventing other characters from gaining too much control or money, or making too much trouble, until the cards run out. As Lord Vetinari is one of the personalities available to the game players it’s clear that he has vanished entirely on his own terms and has some kind of long-term plan. Or maybe he just wanted a holiday, who knows?

Sir Terry Pratchett, the amazing creator of the Discworld series (among other things) has the same fail-safe clause for the end of several of his games. It’s partly what makes the games so brilliant. In every Terry Pratchett game it’s possible for any of the game players to win, but in Ankh-Morpork, Guards! Guards!, and Witches if certain conditions are met, then the game ends and nobody wins. Which is fantastic, because it almost adds a cooperative edge to game play as everyone wants to win individually, but definitely none of you want to lose to the game!

I will admit that I’m slightly at a loss as for what to write now. I’ve summed up the game and a bit about the books, and to be honest, I really think that the city of Ankh-Morpork is too big of a feature in the series of the Discworld to be really described or talked about without me insisting that anyone reading this post goes away immediately to read every Discworld book so as to fully understand the enormity of detail in which the city has been described and personified and used a backdrop for all sorts of events.

To tie in with what the re-readathoners have been discussing over on Goodreads, the city of Ankh-Morpork features shortly in Wyrd Sisters, the novel that’s been the subject of this month. Anyone who’s read the book will know that Wyrd Sisters is a very entertaining, silly, and just all-round highly enjoyable version of Shakespeare’s Macbeth. Featuring a Duke who murders his cousin, the King, so that he can be king and then goes mad. There are some differences, obviously, between Shakespeare’s tragedy and Terry Pratchett’s hilarious novel. But the story can be seen there nonetheless. Ankh-Morpork features in the novel as the place where the rightful heir to the throne is living with the acting troupe he was adopted by as a baby. This troupe is hired by the court Fool to perform a play for the Duke portraying him favorably, and the witches, Granny Weatherwax, Nanny Ogg and Magrat Garlickbadly so that the witches will lose their power and the people will like him.
The brief featuring of Ankh-Morpork is funny in this novel as the Fool is robbed when he enters the city. The thief performing the robbery expected him only to be carrying a few dollars, but instead he was carrying a vast amount of money given to him by the Duke to employ the acting troupe. The thief then freaks out because according to Guild law he’s not allowed to rob more than a certain amount off of one person. Tomjon, heir to the throne, steps in and resolves the situation. Although it’s a very brief appearance made it holds true to the way the city is, Ankh-Morpork, the city where there is a Guild for everything.

That about wraps us up for this game and this month! I intend to have next month’s post Guards! Guards! up by the middle of the month, rather than the second-last day!

I hope this post has been informative, and you’re now burning with the desire to read Discworld novels for the rest of the year.

It’s January and the Twelve Games of Christmasare now finished until December. Hopefully they’ve been an entertaining interlude over the holiday, but now it’s time to get back to business!

As promised I am now going to unveil all the plans and things that we’ve been preparing for this year.

The Plans:

Aesthetic Blog Changes:

First though, for anyone who’s been on the blog regularly, they might have noticed that we’ve had a bit of a makeover. Dave took an editorial walk around the blog and we decided that it was probably time for a change. So, there’s a new banner, which is tied into part of my plan for the year, plus there are some updates on the About page, making our About info somewhat more up-to-date.

We now have a Contactpage, which is quite exciting. Our official blog email is there and that’s checked at least three times a week by me. We’d like to invite anyone reading this to contact us if there’s a game you think we should review, or if you’re developing a game and would like us to play it for you, and help promote it!

Whilst Dave was wandering around editing stuff he thought that the blog looked somewhat like it was run by a pair of goths, hence the new, slightly less gray, colour scheme.
Okay, that’s all the aesthetic changes that have been made since November, now, onto the plans for the year!

The Games and Posts-Related Plans:

As you’re all aware from my November and December Updatesthere are interesting things happening this year.

The first of which is the already mentioned Discworldathon, which is happening on three blogs run by my family, and a fair few others run by people I don’t really know. Over the rest of this year there will be Discworld game posts going up, approximately every other month starting this month. These will be much shorter than our previous in-depth game reviews, and more tied to the books and films. These are a side-branch of what we normally do, as we thought a little cross-genre blog interaction could be a really good and interesting thing, definitely something with potential for the future. Discworld fans, keep an eye out for those posts!

The second plan for this year is to begin research into old games, from different countries around the world. To research the cultural history of those countries, and the developments of the games that they traditionally played. To be totally honest I don’t have any idea how that’s going to pan out, or even if it’s going to work. At the moment I don’t really know how much information is available to me and I don’t have tons of time to trawl through every resource or book or whatever. So, we’ll see how that goes. My intention is to try and post one research-based post per month, focusing on one country at a time. If there’s lots of information to be had I may extend it to two months focused on the same country.

The third plan is for a series of short posts, similar in nature to those about the Games We Mademaking suggestions for games you can make at home if you’re bored, or if you don’t have lots of storage space for boxes and such. My idea is make a collection of paper games that can be stored flat in one big folder, or something similar. Those posts will be a little sporadic, as they’re taking the back burner to all the other stuff at the moment, but I think they’ve got potential to go on for a decent amount of time.

Lastly, Games We’re Reviewing This Year!

I hereby proclaim this to be a Settlers of Catan year! I intend to find and play every expansion and spin-off of this game series over the next twelve months. Although there are a lot, there aren’t actually enough to post a different expansion or spin-off every week for twelve months, so the Catan posts will be mixed in with other Catan-ish games that I can find over the rest of the year.

Very very lastly: I can’t promise one post every week at the moment, as I’m in the throes of moving into a new flat, which doesn’t have any wifi yet, and might not have for quite a while. So I’m going to have to borrow wifi from other people for a while, or write all the posts on my phone (which isn’t an appealing idea to me). My new years blogolutions are:

To try and post as regularly as I can, even if it means sitting in Starbucks for five hours writing posts.

To follow through on all my plans for the year at least long enough to see if they’re worth making a permanent feature.

That’s everything! Hopefully this wasn’t long enough to bore you, and you’re still going to come back and read our first real post of the year, whenever I get it done!

This is a little underwhelming I know. But I have been formulating a plan in the time since then, and I promise it doesn’t involve every second post being an update! The first part of the plan involves my sister, Bex, blogging about books over at anarmchairbythesea, and Terry Pratchett, well-known author of the Discworld series of books, among other things.

The second part of the plan involves Christmas!

A little explanation is in order? Perhaps.

I don’t want to say too much in case of two things;

I fail epically at making any of this happen, OR,

I fail at making you (the reader) excited about it, and therefore unlikely to return to read the fruit of these plans.

Part 1:

A basic sum-up of the plan can, however, be given. The part involving Bex goes like this: she’s organizing and partially hosting a Discworld Readathon or ‘Discworldathon’ (as she’s taken to calling it) on her blog, starting in January and continuing for one full year with each month having a Discworld-novel theme.
Since Terry Pratchett also authorized the creation of several board games based on the books, which we have already reviewed on this blog (the reviews can be read here) we thought it could be a nice idea to tie in the Discworldathon with some kind of replay or re-enjoyment of the related games. As of now we’re not 100% sure what the best way to work this out is, but we’re theorizing and planning and scheming and such, and we’ll undoubtedly come up with something.

Part 2:

This is the part of the plan involving Christmas. As some avid and dedicated readers may remember we did a series of posts entitled “Twelve Games of Christmas” in 2013. These, based on the statistics of the site, were quite popular. So I intend to bring them back this year. I’m hoping to be organized enough to make this possible, and I’ve already compiled a list of potential games to use for this.

That about sums up everything that’s in the works at the moment, and my hope is that even if posting is sporadic there should be a decent amount of posts going up around Christmas and some definite ones happening in the New Year in connection to Bex’s Discworldathon.

That’s everything for now, and I sincerely hope that my next post is not an update!

That Time I almost Lost at Chess…To a GIRL!…Who’s Younger than Me!

Luckily for me she backed herself into a stalemate and my pride was slightly less destroyed than it could have been. Like our Cripple Mr. Onion post this post is a bit of a bonus this month. Being a game invented by Terry Pratchett(well, more an adaptation of a classic game) we decided it needed a mention.

Being Stealthy at Chess:

Stealth Chess is much like normal Chess in the sense that all the regular rules of Chess apply and all the normal pieces are present and used. The game is altered by the widening of the board by one row on each side; these rows are called Slurks, and the addition of two pieces to each side which are Assassins. The Assassins start in the Slurks next to the Rooks, and only the Assassins can move in the Slurks. Unfortunately we did not have a Stealth Chess board lying around so we had to make do with a normal Chess board and imagine the additional rows, additionally the pieces that look very different to the others are pieces we borrowed from a different set to act as the Assassins.

Stealth Chess starting positions.

Like in normal Chess all normal rules apply with the addition of the rules concerning the Assassins and Slurks. Assassins move one space in any direction but can move two to capture. Only they can move in the Slurks, and now you get the complicated bit; the Assassin can move as many spaces out of the Slurks as he has in the Slurks. To clarify, if over the course of 6 moves the Assassin has moved six spaces in the Slurks (including just backwards and forwards) the Assassin may move up to six space out of the Slurks, when exiting it, in one move and then an additional space to capture. So:

This white Assassin has moved three spaces in the Slurks:

So it’s in range of the Black (purple) Queen.

So on exiting the Slurks it can capture the Queen like so:

So the Queen gets taken.

Now the only point of ambiguity we have in this is “can the Assassin move through other pieces in this way?” Our answer was yes as, if you read the rules as laid out on Wikipediahere or the Discworld Wikihere, it describes the Slurks as another board under the existing board. So rather than moving down the side of the board it represents a space under the board which the Assassins move through and pop up to capture things. Additionally to all of this Assassins cannot take each other, out of professional courtesy.

The End and Other Things:

Normally I destroy my sister at Chess and our game of Stealth Chess was going the same way until I made one massive error and then it nearly all ended in tears. Except after a long time she managed to fight me into this position:

How it all ended.

Which of course is Stalemate. However I think by the fifty-move rule it may have already been stalemate but that’s neither here nor there.

Anyway that’s the last time I lose concentration.

So a few last comments about Stealth Chess:

It’s given me an awesome idea for a two tiered version of Chess… Literally building two Chess boards that sit over each other.

Also to build an actual Stealth Chess board with the Slurks and proper Assassin pieces.

A couple of interesting “facts” about the game are:

On the Discworld it’s thought to actually be the original version of the game – “this belief is corroborated by the in-world discovery, in a tomb in Muntab, of a preserved corpse with an 8×10 board embedded in its skull and a pawn hammered up each nostril”

All in all it’s an interesting adaptation of Chess and a bit difficult to get your head around if you’re so used to thinking about Chess in the standard way. It’s well worth a play, and you don’t even have to buy anything if you already have a Chess set and a bit of imagination!

Disclaimer: No onions were crippled in the making of this post… Much.

We’re all aware that it’s Terry Pratchett month, and that the last official post for this month has now gone up – The Witches. So now we’ve played all four officially produced Discworld games we wanted to have a look at the slightly more unofficial games. The most well known of these is Cripple Mr Onion. This is a fictitious card game that Terry Pratchett invented that’s played all over the Disc. It features in Wyrd Sisters, Reaper Man, Witches Abroadand Lords and Ladies. A game called “Shibo Yancong-San” (Cripple Mr Onion in Chinese) also appears in Interesting Times.

The game is played with an 8-suited deck of cards, the Discworld has its own deck of cards, called the caroc deck. However, for the purposes of playing in our universe a deck with the following eight suits and suit-pairs is acceptable: Spades and Axes, Clubs and Tridents, Hearts and Roses and Diamonds and Doves.

With the intention of learning the game, I acquired one such deck from the Fat Pack Playing Card Company, which has made learning the game easier, as the other alternative is to shuffle two normal decks together, but this presents the problem of having then two of each suit, and could get very confusing.

The game is a little like Poker in two respects, the first of which is that you must make the highest scoring hand to win the round, and the second of which is that, if you don’t play it often, the rules are such that’s it’s easy to forget them and end up both confused and annoyed. There’s a dealer for each round, which changes at the end of every round. The game starts by each player being dealt five cards face down, which they are immediately allowed to look at and can then discard up to four of them, being given replacement cards by the dealer. Once everyone’s done this a further five cards are dealt face up onto the table in front of each player – except the dealer, who receives theirs face down.

The first player then begins by trying to assemble a high-scoring hand (I’ll list the different hand in point order in a minute), once they’ve done this, the player to their left must assemble a higher-scoring hand, or fold. If they succeed in creating a higher scoring hand the first player is then allowed to try to rearrange their cards to score even higher, or fold. Once on player has been forced to fold play continues to the left until one player remains. This player wins the hand and becomes the dealer for the next round.

Scoring – lowest to highest hands:

Bagel – two cards with values totalling 20.

Two-card Onion – two cards with values totalling 21.

Broken Flush – three or more cards totalling between 16 and 21 inclusive with all but onein the same suit-pair.

Three-card Onion – three cards with values totalling 21.

Flush – like a Broken Flush but with all cards in the same suit-pair.

Four-card Onion – see other Onions.

Broken Royal – combination of 678 of any suit.

Five-card Onion – same-same, see above.

Royal – combination of 777 of any suit.

Six-card Onion – you get the idea by now.

Wild Royal – combination of 888 in a hand when eights are wild. (Wild eights’ll be explained a bit further down)

Seven-card Onion

Double Onion – two picture cards and two aces.

Triple Onion – three picture cards and three aces.

Lesser Onion – four picture cards and four aces.

Great Onion – five picture cards and five aces.

Thus ends how to make points in this game. But now you begin to wonder “Isn’t the game called Cripple Mr Onion? We’ve had a lot of onions so far, but no crippling…” and you’d be right to present this question. Crippling Mr Onion comes into play when we get to the modifiers for the game. This is the bit that confused me the most, simply because there’s a lot to remember. So what I’m going to do, for the purposes of keeping this post fairly short, is simply list all the possible modifiers that can be played, and link you to a proper explanation of them. Except Wild Eights, which I said I’d explain, Crippling Mr Onion, because it’s the whole point of this post and The Fool, because that one’s funny. So here we go:

Modifiers:

These can be played through the game to increase the value of a hand and, with the exception of the crippling rule, are all optional extras to the game. I’ll list the ones I’m not explaining first, and finish with the most interesting ones.

Wild Crippling

Octavo

The Lady

Fate

Great A’Tuin

The Sender of Eights

Death

The Archchancellor

Now, on to the others! We’ll start by explaining how to Cripple Mr Onion:

In the event that a player displays a Great Onion as their hand for a round, another player may immediately display a nine-card running flush and thereby instantly win the hand. If a player’s displayed a Great or Lesser Onion another player may display a ten-card running flush to Cripple Mr Onion, they may also use this to steal a win from a player who’s just Crippled an Onion using only a nine-card running flush. This is the only non-optional modifier.

Once your onion’s been crippled, you may find it looks a little like this:

Poor Crippled Mr Onion…

Wild Eights:

This modifier’s actually called Null Eights but it makes eights wild. So, in a normal hand, where eights are not wild, an eight may be played as if its value were zero or eight, to increase the size of a hand in order to score higher. Because of this you can include them in an Onion to improve its size. However, in the round following the one in which this took place, eights become wild for the duration of that round and this modifier cannot be used again until the following round.

The Fool:

This is the last thing I’m going to explain. If a player holds the Jack of Clubs, they may declare it before the first player’s played their first group of cards. If they do this, Onions and Bagels switch places in scoring so a Double Bagel or Triple Bagel etc, become the most valuable hands with the single exception that a Great Onion will still beat a Great Bagel. It also then becomes possible for another player to Cripple Mr Bagel.Which is the only reason I wanted to specifically explain this one. I just like the concept of crippling a bagel.

Conclusion-y-type-things:

There you have an explanation of how to play Cripple Mr Onion, I promise it’s only complicated for the first few hands, after that it begins to get easier as you begin to be able to spot the most useful combinations of cards! It can be a really quick game too, so it’s good for if you’ve only got a few minutes (provided you don’t have to learn the rules first) and you can play with up to seven people, so play it with all you friends!

All the info I got for this post was got from here, plus there’s extra stuff to read there if you want it, and a full explanation of all the modifiers.

Lancre could probably be considered a bit of a backwards country, and, complete with all its quirks and oddities, is the setting for The Witches! Which is a fantastic board game based on part of Sir Terry Pratchett’s Discworld series. As this month is Pratchett month we decided to post the games up in the order that they were published, so The Witches,having only been published last year, is the most recent, and therefore the last post. Guards! Guards! and Ankh-Morpork were published in the same year, and so were tied for second place after Thud.The Witches is currently the only one of the four Discworld board games that have been published that’s suitable for one player. You can travel around the mountains of Lancre solving problems and fighting monsters all on your lonesome – or you can play with up to three other witches and meet up for tea and a chat!

Four 6-sided Witch dice (notice here that two of the dice are showing a witches face, this is because these dice do not have the value for 1 on them. The witch face represents a Cackle, which is equal to a score of 0).

Twelve Crisis counters.

Fifty-five Game cards.

Sixteen Cackle counters.

Twelve Black Aliss tiles.

Thirty Easy Problem tiles (green).

Seventeen Hard Problem tiles (purple).

Playing the Game:

Objective: To solve more problems than the other players, and therefore score the most points at the end of the game!

Setting up the Board:

The initial set up for the board is very simple in this game, you simply shuffle all your Hard Problem tiles, and place one face down on each square on the board with a purple square in the top left corner of it, and do the same with the Easy Problem tiles. You then refer to the rules to see how many of remaining tiles from both Hard and Easy are set face down on the spaces in the bottom right of the board. If you look closely at the picture you can see that, if you don’t want to go back to the rules, the board actually tells you how many of each type of problem to put in each square, depending on the number of players.

So in the first stage of setting up the board, it should look like this. We had three players this time that we played, and so the number of tiles in the bottom right of the board are set accordingly.

Once all the tiles are laid out like this, all the Easy Problem tiles can be turned face-up. All the Hard Problem tiles remain face-down on the board until a player moves to deal with one, then it’s flipped for everyone to see. Next you need to shuffle the deck of Game cards, and deal three to each player, the rest are placed face-down next to the board.

Lastly you should assign characters. To do this each player rolls all four Witch dice and the player with the highest total roll is allowed to choose their preferred Trainee Witch display. Note: rolling a Cackle counts as zero here, and in the event of a tie, both players re-roll all the dice. Once the highest rolling player has chosen their Trainee Witch Display, then player who had the next highest total chooses… And so on.

You then take the Witch piece of the correct colour for your persona for the game, and, if your Trainee Witch has one, also your Advantage Tile. Tiffany, Petulia and Annagramma all have these, Tiffany’s is blue and is an Invisibility tile, Petulia’s is green and is a Cure Sick Pig tile, and Annagramma’s is red and is a Magic tile. I’ll explain the benefits of these tiles later on. Annagramma also starts with one Cackle counter, if she’s in play. The last Trainee Witch that can be chosen is Dimity Hubbub, her special ability is that whichever player chooses to play as her, gets to play first. If she’s not in play, the player who chose last goes first, and play then proceeds clockwise around the board. Finally, each player (starting with she/he that chose last) should place their Witch piece on any empty space on the board.

The board should look like this just before the first player takes their turn:

Complete starting set up for three players (although the Easy Problems in the bottom right section are supposed to be face-up too, whoops!) – as you can see, Dimity Hubbub is not in play in this game.

The Rules:

Playing the game is very simple. A turn consists of three phases, placing the next Problem tile, moving you Witch, and drawing cards. The first thing you do during your turn is draw the top card from the deck and place it face up beside the board. Each card in the deck has a location written on it, if there’s no Problem tile or Witch in the location on the card you draw, the top Problem tile is taken from the leftmost stack, and placed face-up in this location. If there’s already a problem here however, a Crisis counter is placed on top of it. These add two points to the difficulty of the problem and look like this:

A Crisis counter on top of an Easy Problem tile, this adds two to the difficulty of the problem.

If there’s a Witch in the location you draw then a problem cannot be placed there, and if they’re in either Lancre Castle or Lancre Town, where there are multiple spaces available, you do not place Crisis counters on problems existing there. If a Witch is present, Crisis cannot happen and problems do not occur. If you place a Crisis counter on a problem, you must continue drawing cards until you find an empty location in which to place the next problem. You may then continue with your turn.

Next you move; a Witch can move up to two connections per turn, unless they have in their hand a card with a broomstick symbol on it. If they choose to play this, they can fly to anywhere on the board and it counts as one of their movements.

Lastly, you tackle problems! To beat a problem you have to roll either equal to or higher than the number shown in the white circle on the problem tile, you must also factor in the Crisis counters, if there’s one on the tile. To beat a problem you roll all four dice, but not together. You roll two first and can then decide if you want to play any of the cards in your hand. The text is often useful for solving problems. Once you’ve decided, you roll the next two dice. Note: if you roll enough on your first roll to beat the problem, you must still roll the second set of dice to see if you get any Cackles. If you roll any Cackles, you take one Cackle counter for each Cackle rolled.

Rolling to solve a problem, this player must take one Cackle counter for their roll.

If you fail to beat a problem, you must run away, and if it was a Hard problem, you must face the consequences! There’s a lot of variance in consequences however, so I won’t go through them.

At the end of your turn you discard any cards you played and refill your hand to the maximum number of cards you can hold. If the deck of cards runs out, the discard pile is shuffled and flipped, and play continues, the game comes to a natural end at the end of the turn of the person who places the last problem tile on the board.

Lastly I’ll explain the Advantage tiles I mentioned earlier. Tiffany has a blue Advantage tile, which is invisibility, this allows her to go onto the same space as a Hard problem tile, look at it, and then choose either to solve it, or go somewhere else. Everyone else has no choice but to try and solve the problem, no matter how hard it may be, if they enter the same space as it.
Annagramma has a red Magic tile; there are three different symbols that appear on the top of each Game card; either a broomstick, a star, or a pair of glasses and a mustache (also known as Headology). Of these three symbols, Magic and Headology can be used to your advantage when solving a problem. Magic gives you a plus two bonus (but you must take a Cackle counter for every Magic card played) and Headology gives you a plus one bonus. Annagramma’s Magic tile can be played for the plus two bonus when solving one problem at some point in the game.
Petulia has a green Cure Sick Pig tile. This is fairly self-explanatory; when Petulia enters the same space as a Sick Pig problem tile, this Advantage tile can be used to automatically solve the problem.

Petulia’s Cure Sick Pig tile in action!

All three Advantage tiles can only be used once in the game. They must then be discarded by the player that used them.

Strategy:

There’s not a lot to be said for strategy for this game, as it mostly comes down to the roll of the dice. But it’s good to have tried to solve a variety of Easy and Hard problems throughout the game, not only do Hard problems usually score more points than Easy ones, they also give you a different benefit the more of them you collect.

History and Interesting (or just other) Things:

There isn’t much history to this game (and even less that’s interesting enough to write about) so have some things about the fictional Discworld country of Lancre instead:

Lancre is good Witch country, there’s a high level of background magic, and the country has always been renowned for producing some of the best Witches and Wizards in the history of the Discworld.

It’s shown to be about 40 miles by 10 miles in size, but this isn’t the truth. Because of the background magic some areas of Lancre have been known to take on other geographical properties.

It has Gnarly Ground. This is a place, on the Lancre Moores, where reality has become folded, and so two places may appear to be right next to each other, but are actually miles apart. Crossing it (or flying over it) is not for the faint-hearted.

It is the physical location of, certainly one, but possibly two, gateways to Parasite Universes, inhabited by Elves.

The current King of Lancre is Verence II. He is believed to be the illegitimate son of Verence I; he was the castle Fool until his half-brother, Tomjon’s immediate abdication after being offered the crown.

Lancre is technically as constitutional monarchy, in that Verence II has set up a parliament, but mostly the people aren’t interested.

Regicide is an accepted method of becoming King in the history of the country.

The population is only 500.

The Lancrastians generally aren’t particularly religious, but they do believe in services for births, marriages and deaths and know exactly what they believe religion should sound like, which is more or less a Latin Roman Catholic service.

The climate there goes to extremes, with burning summers, unbelievable storms and masses of snow, respective to the time of year.

Different publications of the game:

There is a collectors edition of this game, which is the same in rules and gameplay to the edition we’ve got, but with the addition of sculpted pewter figurines, instead of small wooden witches hats as your playing pieces and a different shaped box and artwork, and a bonus A1 poster.

I’m personally of the opinion that Ankh Morpork is the best Discworld board game so far, and I believe Dave agrees with me. However, this game is also brilliantly conceived. It’s more laid back than Ankh Morpork, in that, you’re not really trying to one up any of the other players, or double-bluff them into not knowing your objective, or anything like that, because you’re all sharing the same objective and there are plenty of problems on the board, so you don’t usually ever have to go for the same one as another player!

It’s also great because you can play it as a 1-player game, just to fill a rainy afternoon. I highly recommend this game, to everyone, but also specifically to people who prefer games that aren’t super-competitive!